Traversing the Mist

Traversing the Mist is a multi-user virtual reality experience in which three participants inhabit the same virtual world simultaneously. Embodying identical avatars, they wander through a surreal gay sauna where fragments of memories, desires, and intimate encounters gradually emerge.

Expanding the universe first introduced in In the Mist (2020), the work shifts from solitary observation to collective experience. Participants become both witnesses and companions as they navigate spaces shaped by longing, intimacy, ageing, and connection.

While multi-user VR presents significant technological challenges, Traversing the Mist is ultimately driven by a search for poetry within virtual space. Through shared movement, proximity, and presence, it explores forms of human encounter that can exist only in virtual reality.

Rarely addressed in immersive media, queer desire and intimacy become the starting point for a reflection on how technology reshapes the ways we see ourselves and one another.

The work was presented in the Cannes Immersive Competition 2024 and received the Grand Jury Prize at NewImages Festival 2024, where the jury praised it as “a groundbreaking communal immersive experience.”